Lusca

Variations: Giant Scuttle, Him of the Hands

Off the shores of Andros Island in the Bahamas are the blue holes. These are deep submarine caves that appear as dark “holes” in the sea. Local lore claims that they are bottomless, and while it may be safe to sail over them, diving is perilous. The Lusca embodies the terror of these dark places and personifies their dangerous currents. The blue holes are littered with the skeletons of its victims and the wreckage of boats and outboard motors.

A lusca is a gigantic octopus or cuttlefish, sometimes said to be half octopus and half dragon. It is also known as a “giant scuttle”, where “scuttle” is the Bahamian term for octopus, and “Him of the Hands”, although it is unclear whether those are actual hands or merely a reference to cephalopod arms. Those arms can reach up to 75 feet (roughly 23 meters) long. They are dangerous because they can grab a boat or a fisherman from one end and anchor themselves to the bottom on the other; if they cannot make fast to the seafloor, they cannot pull their prey down.

The lusca shoots its “hands” out of the water to snatch anyone or anything that comes too close to a blue hole. A lusca can stop a two-master dead in the water, coiling its tentacles around the rudder while its “hands” reach up and feel around the deck. The moment the tentacles contact a human, they immediately pull the unfortunate sailor into the water.

George J. Benjamin and Jacques-Yves Cousteau were both warned of the dangers of the lusca, but failed to find any trace of the giant octopus. In fact, Benjamin succeeded in retrieving an outboard motor supposedly lost to a lusca, much to the bemusement of the motor’s proprietor.

Wood and Gennaro identify the St. Augustine blob, found on a Florida beach, as being the same animal as the lusca. As the blob was found to be a mass of connective tissue from a large vertebrate, probably a whale, this is unlikely.

References

Benjamin, G. J. (1970) Diving into the Blue Holes of the Bahamas. National Geographic, 138(3), pp. 347-363.

Cousteau, J. and Diolé, P. (1973) Trois Aventures de la Calypso. Flammarion.

Fodor, E. (1981) Fodor’s Caribbean and the Bahamas. Hodder and Stoughton, London.

Naish, D. (2016) Hunting Monsters: Cryptozoology and the Reality Behind the Myths. Arcturus, London.

Wood, F. G. and Gennaro, J. F. (1971) An Octopus Trilogy. Natural History, LXXX(3), pp. 15-24 and 84-87.

24 Comments

  2. Imagine if someone survived being on a boat when it was attacked by a kraken so they decided to try to assuage their trauma with a vacation to the Caribbean only to have their boat attacked by a lusca. He survives again and decides to try another vacation in Japan but his boat gets attacked by Akkorokamui. Every sea he goes to he ends up getting attacked by the lpcal mythic cephalopods when one day he’s just had enough.

    “That’s it! No more sailing on the sea. Where’s a good place that’s landlocked? I know! Oklahoma!”

    The very second his boat sails from his summerhouse down by the water he gets wrecked by a lake octopus.

    Liked by 2 people

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